Recently I received an email letter from a
friend of a friend. This person is a teacher and very active in the fight to
change her union. She seemed to me to be experiencing some of the burn-out that
sometimes affects us all. ED.

Hello, [name]:

You wrote me that:

<< As long
as most of the teaching staff on our campuses is white, middle class, and the
vast majority of our students in the public schools are people of color from
various ethnic backgrounds and from working families and families in crisis,
>>

I don't really agree with this as an analysis.
I mean, the problem in the schools is not the color of the teachers or even the
class background of the teachers, in my opinion. Teachers don't become teachers
because they want to fail at teaching; they want to succeed. The problem is that
the education system is rigged against teachers and students. It is designed to
reproduce and reinforce the system of inequality and class domination of the
society. It would have the same outcome no matter what the color or background
of the teachers. The problem with an analysis that gives such prominence to the
color or background of the teachers, I think, is that it makes teachers the
problem and makes them an enemy.

I appreciate you sending me notes on how
things are going for you. You and I have never met, and I hope I'm not being
presumptuous by offering my viewpoint.

I've been sorry to read how stressed out and
isolated you seem to feel. It sounds like you're in a very tough position, and
dealing with the union I'm sure is maddening. I don't know if I can say anything
that will be helpful to you, except that it's very important to try not to see
your colleagues too critically.

I speak from experience. As a young radical
professor during the Vietnam war, I was so distraught by the war and so outraged
that my colleagues weren't doing much about it that I managed to alienate just
about everyone I dealt with. I'm not saying that this is what you're doing, I'm
just saying that this is the biggest "occupational hazard" of
activists/revolutionaries. We can get so involved in seeing what's wrong—and
there's so goddamn much that is wrong—that we can lose sight of the basic
goodness of the people around us.

The fact that our friends and colleagues
aren't involved in the same ways as we are does not mean that they don't care
about the same things or have the same values as we. It may simply mean that
they don't see much possibility of change, or maybe they have other things going
on in their lives that they have to focus on, or maybe we don't yet have a
movement that is really inviting to people, because we are too frantic ourselves
about the wrongs that we see and the changes we want to make.

We are living in a very difficult time. The
revolutionary movements of the past have failed, and while the necessity for
revolution seems ever more obvious to so many of us, the possibility of
revolution seems very remote to most people. People like you and me and Gregg
Shotwell and Tom Laney and others have a special task, which is historically
very important. That task is to help find the basis for hope for a new world
which can help inspire a new movement. I think it's pretty clear that we're not
going to find that inspiration in a text of Marx or some other revolutionary
thinker from the past. We have to find that inspiration in our own lives and in
the lives of the people around us—our students, our colleagues, our families,
the very people whom we may find maddeningly frustrating at times (and who no
doubt find us maddening too). Finding our inspiration in other people is
absolutely essential to the creation of a new revolutionary movement, and it's
essential also, in my experience, to our personal salvation. Without it we are
lost.

A few years ago, when three or four of us in
Boston were talking together and were first starting New Democracy, we concluded
that "revolutions are built on hope, and the basis of hope is confidence in
other people." We also decided that we couldn't just be experts on what's
wrong. Our most important task as revolutionaries is to see the good in people
and in their lives. That's the only place we're really going to find hope.

We're all of us in this fight for the long
haul. We all need friendships and relationships we feel safe with and can rely
on. It's very clear that you feel a lot of stress right now. If I can offer some
advice, I would say just focus for awhile on making and building friendships.
You must teach with some good people. Forget about "politics." Or
rather, if you truly believe as I do that "the personal is political,"
just concentrate on repairing relationships with your fellow teachers, gaining
their confidence, learning from them, hearing more about what their concerns
are, what their hopes are. Be a friend.

As I say, I hope I'm not being presumptuous. I
don't know if this makes any sense, but I hope it does and that it is of some
use to you. You have my very best wishes. Hang in there.